Every Flavour Beans

The Wiley book, Linux Bible - 2007 Edition, by Christopher Negus, the author of popular book Red Hat Linux Bible, got at least one thing right: it gives the reader an option to select one of many GNU/Linux distributions available today according to his or her requirements/taste. The necessity of sticking to a distribution just because it happened to come with the a “Red Hat Linux Bible,” “Debian GNU/Linux Bible,” “The Official Ubuntu Book”, “Linux Made Easy” and plenty of other such GNU/Linux books that the user happened to buy in search of a ‘linux book’ is present no more. This book covers the installations of over a dozen GNU/Linux distributions and includes all of those distributions on the DVD & CD that come with the book. The distributions covered by the book include:

1. Fedora Core
2. Debian GNU/Linux
3. openSUSE Linux
4. KNOPPIX
5. Yellow Dog Linux
6. Gentoo Linux
7. Slackware Linux
8. Freespire
9. Mandriva Linux
10. Ubuntu Linux
11. Coyote Linux Firewall

I am particularly happy with the inclusion of Slackware and Gentoo Linux.

The book also points out small yet useful distributions like Puppy Linux, Damn Small Linux, BackTrack Suite, System Rescue CD, MoviX, GeeXboX, KnoppMyth(TV), Dyne:boli(multimedia)c and more.

The book comes with a DVD and a CD-ROM, details of the contents of which are provided in an appendix in the book. The DVD that comes with the book contains the following distributions/images.

• Fedora Core 6(installs directly from the DVD)
• Slackware 11(installs directly from the DVD)
• Live CDs of KNOPPIX 5.0.1 and BackTrack (boots directly from the DVD)
• Ubuntu 6.10(boots directly from the DVD)
• Gentoo Linux((boots directly from the DVD)
• Mandriva One 2007(boots directly from the DVD)
• Freespire 1.0.13 ISO image

The CD contains the following distributions:

• Live CDs of Damn Small Linux, INSERT, SLAX, System Rescue CD, Puppy Linux and Coyote Linux.
• Minimal install CDs of Debian, SUSE and Gentoo. Need a working Internet connection to complete the installation.

All of these can be booted right from the CD-ROM.

The book covers much more than just how to install or run the above mentioned distributions of course. The first two parts provide a general introduction to all aspects of GNU/Linux operating system - shell commands, GUI desktop, basic administration, Internet, and security.

The penultimate two parts discuss audio and video playback, word processors and image manipulators, email and web clients, gaming(could’ve been avoided), server software like web(Apache), database(MySQL), PHP, EMail(Exim), Print(CUPS) and File(NFS and Samba) servers.

The last part contains two chapters on programming under GNU/Linux.

More information on the product website and Amazon.

Sun released the second version of Solaris Express Developer Edition(SXDE) in June this year. It was made available to the users in one of the two ways:

1. Download the CD/DVD images from Sun’s website.
2. Place an electronic order for a free DVD Kit containing SXDE. Completely free of cost including international shipping(limited time offer).

I received my Solaris Express Developer Edition 5/07 DVD a week ago and wanted to try it out in VMWare. I will eventually install it on a real machine to find out its hardware compatibility. Below is a screenshot guided tour of the procedure to install SXDE in VMWare; the procedure would be the same for a PC too, except for the things like the risks involved in partitioning the hard disk where more care will be needed.

1. Insert the Solaris DVD into the DVD-ROM drive and boot the computer. Alternatively, create a new virtual machine with at least 8GB hard disk space and 768MB RAM, more is highly recommended. Start the virtual machine with its CD-ROM drive mounted on the physical drive.
2. You will see the boot menu. Keep “Solaris Express, Developer Edition” menu entry selected and press ENTER.
   
3. Solaris is booting into the installer.
   
4. Select your keyboard layout.
   
5. Solaris installer tests if it has detected the graphics hardware properly or not. If you can read the text, then click within the text area window with the mouse and press ENTER. The installation will proceed.
   
   
6. Select a language and press “Next”.
   
7. Select your country.
   
8. The current date and time according to the country selected will be shown next. Correct it if it is wrong and press “Next”.
   
9. Select a root password and enter it twice in the provided text boxes and press “Next”.
   
10. The SXDE license agreement, read carefully. Press the “Next” button if you want to continue with the installation.
    
11. Select additional localisations to install. English will be installed by default.
    
12. Partitioning has to be done carefully if installing on a real drive containing other operating systems and data. First select the drive which contains free/unallocated space, create the needed partitions(/, /export/home, swap etc) etc. The following screenshots should give you an idea if you have ever created partitions while installing a GNU/Linux OS.
    
    
    
    
13. The installation will now begin.
    
14. The developer tools are installed after the operating system is installed.
    
15. The installation is finished. Press “Reboot Now” to reboot the computer/virtual machine. The first time you boot into the Solaris system, some configuration steps need to be performed.
    
16. Solaris installer doesn’t provide the option to create a non-privileged user account, so you have to login the first time as root.
    
17. Choose a desktop, I prefer GNOME.
    
18. As soon as the desktop is loaded, create a new user account. “Users and Groups” window will be opened automatically; Press “Add User” button and fill out the details. Logout and re-login as non-privileged user as soon as possible.
    
    
19. Complete the registration if you wish, otherwise click “Cancel”.
    
20. You need a Sun Online Account to finish the registration process. You can create it from the registration window.
    
    After registration is finished, hopefully you will have a working Sun Update Manager configuration from where you can install all the updates released for SXDE.
    
21. The desktop. Have fun.
    

Sun Express Developer Edition is the easiest to way to start developing Java applications on a *nix platform.
More information:
Sun Express Developer Edition Home
Sun Express Developer Edition FAQ
Installing Apache, MySQL, PHP(AMP) Stack on SXDE
Upgrade SXDE 2/07 to 5/07